Tuesday, September 21, 2010

That Can’t-Do Spirit

This immediately begs the question, if America isn’t doing so well in non-green industrial development in an ever more competitive globalized world, why would we think that it will be any better for green industry? Why isn’t that going to move to China too?

The very simple answer is that ... it is! To the point where it’s ringing alarm bells here at home. The point is, green energy development is the new Holy Grail. Right now, it’s a modern-day (clean) version of the Texas oil boom of 100 years ago. It’s the California Gold Rush of energy. You want to sit back and just cede ground to the Chinese because they're already making our cheap T-shirts and television sets? Seriously?

This pisses me off enormously because we in Tennessee have seen a great deal of green energy manufacturing: the Sharp solar plant in Memphis, the new Hemlock Semiconductor facility in Clarksville, Nissan’s Leaf built right here in Smyrna, the Wacker Chemie polysilicon plant in Cleveland ... there are probably others but those come to mind. Plus all of the other stuff, the roofers and electricians who install solar panels, etc. And I haven’t even thought about wind turbines and the rest. So you compare this to the shuttering of the last incandescent bulb factory in the United States which employed a mere 200 people and I’m going to say: bullshit. That’s some fancy selective logic there, dude. As your own link states, the reason CFLs are manufactured in China is because of cheap labor, not an act of Congress:

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

But in the meantime, I’d suggest cooling the rhetoric that green industry is somehow going to save our economy from the mess we’re in, because in the short term at least it’s probably only going to dig the hole deeper.

Really? Who says? You? That’s completely crazy. The short term is our window of opportunity! This is our generation’s race to the moon, you moron! This is our Manhattan Project, our Apollo Project! This is our shot at getting back in the game, at having a future at being more than just the world's arms dealer and global couch potato.

Where does Renn get off? Can you imagine if John F. Kennedy had said to forget about landing a man on the moon before the decade’s out since the Russians already got it going with that Sputnik thing?

I've said it before oh, like a thousand times, but I'll say it again: the green train has left the station. We don't want to be left behind on this one, but that's exactly what will happen if we listen to idiots like this.